Strawberry Fields

Strawberry Fields

A couple of weeks ago, my two youngest daughters invited me along with my Grandson Logan to pick strawberries. I reluctantly accepted. Reluctant only due to the fact my almost 53 year old out of shape body with bad knees and the burden of extra weight made me unsure I could manage the workout. I am so elated I decided to tag along.

I met my girls and grandson at the Strawberry field on a steamy hot Saturday that threatened rain. I was delighted and a bit full of nostalgia when I realized these was the very same fields my dear sweet Grandma Goldie and I picked our last strawberries together almost 25 years or more ago.

Boxes in hand, hat sheltering my head I knelt on the straw that lie in the middle of the aisle. It took me a moment or two to descend slowly to the ground and peek under the lush bushes to find succulent red strawberries. Looking up at my two girls already busy picking and my blonde headed grandson having a blast running between the bushes to help made the day all the more special.

We busily picked the strawberries filling out baskets with the juicy red beauties. Sweat began to pour over us and I scooted the best my poor old legs would allow. I alternated between kneeling, bending, sitting flat on my big old butt until I soon had a full basket. My hands stained red with the sweet juice of the berries and legs cramped from my crawling around, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction that I had done the hard work. I had a little help from Logan who thought it was fun to throw them at me to catch.

I have such sweet memories now and told him he was the very first grandchild to ever pick berries with this grandma. It brought to mind my own sweet grandmother and the day we sweated out in the very same field when she came up to visit. We had a wonderful time together and we took our precious berries home where she then set out teaching me to make her jam.

I snapped a few photos of the moment to capture the day with my daughters and I thought of how life had come full circle from one grandmother to another. I was much younger when grandma and I picked berries those many years ago, with only four little girls. I have since added to our family with two sons and several grandchildren.

I will forever treasure this time together, the memories they made, while an old tradition carried on to another generation. Later as I stood in my kitchen taking the stems off the berries I could almost hear my grandmother instruct me on the method and how to carefully pull the stems to savor the juice. I think she must have been telling me much more. Somewhere inside my heart I could hear her telling me to take my time and to treasure the juiciest parts of life, and to savor the sweetness.

Teresa Gale

Hunger Pangs

Hunger Pangs

I am hungry. I am hungry a lot lately. It seems as soon as I admitted it in public that I am fat, the hunger began.

As a matter of fact, as soon as I admitted my new healthy plan for eating, my journey into starvation began. Prior to my confession into blog world, I found I was doing really well, better than well. I was learning to control my snacking, I had left over points every day and the weight was falling off. However, now, I am hungry.
Diets can do that to people. We focus on food constantly, thinking, planning, counting and preparing. Our every thought seems to be on food, the very thing we are trying not to think about because that is how we got fat.

So the battle has begun. As hard as I try not to be hungry, not to think of food, it seems I am way too obsessed. Don’t get me wrong, I am still losing, anywhere from a pound to two pounds a week and the fat clothes that were bursting at the seams have begun to loosen and feel good to wear.

Now I need to figure out how to become un-obsessed with food. After all, we need food to survive, but why do I think I need to have more than I need? Why does anyone feel they need an excess to survive.

I can link my problem back to the childhood thing. Not only did I think I was fat back then and went on a starvation diet where I survived on a few meager bites each day, but there was a time in my childhood, we just didn’t have food. I felt I had to “store up food” when we had it to survive. Then there is the comfort food theory, we eat when we feel bad, we hunger for something and fill ourselves up with food. Everyone has a reason they are over-weight and it isn’t because we desire to be that way, most of the time it depresses us to no end.

Now, I have to focus on other things besides food in order to succeed. How does one do this when I need to also pay attention to what goes into my mouth? How do you calculate calories, points, good healthy food instead of bad food and not become obsessed?

I often wonder about naturally thin people who don’t seem to have this same obsession I do. How do you all stay so thin? Are you ever ravenously hungry and out of control?

Control is the key to success. I need to find the control to let the hunger pass, the focus to adjust to other things and move towards being healthy. Part of the problem with food is the mindless eating we do at our desks or on the run. We act upon what we think is hungry when what really is happening is we are not paying attention to our bodies. Like the smoker who lights up during a certain time or certain event it becomes a habit, but not a good one. I know because I was that smoker.

Getting healthy is work, hard work. I must trade my bad habits for good habits. Food is needed to survive, but too much of anything is bad for you. So I continue I ignore the hunger more often that I did a few months ago, I have started walking more, moving more and the weight loss is my reward.

As I continue down my “hunger for good health” road, I will need to pay attention to the world around me and realize God is providing for me. I don’t need more, I need only “just enough.” God provided for the Israelites in the desert the manna to sustain them and instructed them to take only what they needed for the day and no more. Exodus 16:4-5. God tested his people and he tests me. I want to pass the test with flying colors and readjust my stinking thinking about food. I am turning my hunger for food into a hunger for life. God is walking beside me and I am starting to feel good.

Teresa Gale

Reflections

Stumbling into the bathroom early one morning I was caught quite by surprise. Leaning against the sink and staring into the mirror I viewed a shocking reflection. Turning my head one way and then back, I felt my stomach lurch. It couldn’t be me reflected in the mirror; this had to be a dream, a nightmare even. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I stare back into the vision before me and then quickly retreat.

It amazes me still to this day the horror of what I saw. I chose to do the most natural thing in the world for me; ignore it. Ha! Ignoring the problem is not the answer, but I tried to. I pushed it out of my head, thinking much like Scarlett, “Tomorrow is another day.”

As much as I would like to say this was easy, it wasn’t. It would be the start of why I am writing today on an issue that has been in my life since I was ten years old. What I saw in the mirror and what would follow in the days, weeks and months ahead would be instrumental in turning my focus on my health.

Reflections are a hard thing to ignore, especially for a woman. We stare at our reflections every single day as we put on make-up, brush our hair and teeth. We become so use to what we see; it can be easy to not really pay attention. This particular morning was the beginning of my reality, of my waking up.

Startled by my view of myself in the mirror was soon followed up with the realization that my face and neck were changing, that my “fat clothes” had shrunk and that my neck now had given birth to three chins. Not a very pretty thought or picture. Several photos taken in March and April soon had me shocked into action.

I was appalled by a photo taken of me on Easter. I knew I had gained weight ever since I went off a medication for migraines, but I took no action. I just kept thinking I had a handle on it. Those were my thoughts until my husband took a photo of the kids at Easter playing a musical game and of me reclining on the sofa watching them. My very first thought when I saw the photo of me with enough chins to make the Three Little Piggy’s green with envy, was to delete it and delete it quickly. My hand hovered over the delete button on the camera, finger shaking and tears beginning to well up in my eyes. I hesitated and then decided to leave the photo on my computer.

How did I get here? When did I gain this much weight? I mean, really, do I really eat that much? Questions many dieters for life ask themselves. We have all sorts of tricks up our sleeves to camouflage our abundant bellies and thighs, but the face; oh the face is so hard to hide. I had nowhere to run, no one to blame and no way I would be able to put a bag over my head for the rest of my life.

There was no denying the photo, for not just one was taken but several, all giving the same likeness. I decided to do something else that would throw me into shock, denial and finally fear I stepped on the bathroom scale. You know the one, the menacing metal thing we use as decorations in most homes by throwing towels, magazines or shoes upon. I cleared it off, tentatively stepped on the stark white monster and then just as quickly stepped off. No way! Back on I stepped again, same number stared back at me. Shocked, I felt tears well up again and I quickly stepped off the scale and flew out of the bathroom. Not before making sure that digital nightmare number had eased itself before anyone else knew my secret.

Being fat is one of the worst kept secrets, except for those of us in denial and I am the queen of denial. To make matters worse, my clothes had begun clinging to me in very unflattering ways. My “fat clothes” were tight. I felt totally disappointed in myself and I allowed myself to wallow in the self pity. The number I saw screaming at me was a number higher than I had ever reached before and it truly made me cry.

I reached out to two friends at my church and they shared their own stories. We decided to get together and try a diet we had read about. The support was great, the diet which wasn’t necessarily a diet but an awareness of fullness worked for about three weeks and then commitments and holidays kept us from getting together. The little bit I lost quickly came back. I began to feel hatred and anger at myself.

I had managed in the past many things; I was not a weak willed woman. Yet here I was with a face that was swallowed up in fat and a body that was betraying the truly thin person I was inside. It’s amazing what that reflection one early morning threw me into, not all at once but slowly. I began turning over in my mind what I wanted to do and how I wanted to look for the rest of my life and fat was not in!

My oldest daughter recently embarked on a weight loss journey and looks fantastic. I decided to not look upon my journey as a diet, although in many ways it is, but a new health plan for me. On April 25th I signed up online with Weight Watchers and have been combining both this plan and the other plan. I have turned my journey over to God and stopped fighting myself.

I am on a new path, reflecting on many things in my life, not just food, fat and the view in the mirror, but on my inner being. It’s slow, it is sometimes hard, but oh the revelations have been quite surprising.

I am not sure who is reading me here or if anyone is, I am also unsure of how many will understand or get where I am coming from. I am not sure why I decided to blog about my struggles and soon some successes, but I am in hopes I will find out soon.

In the end, I was and am unhappy with hiding away, hiding behind layers of fat and being uncomfortable in my own skin. Change is never easy, it is hard work. At my age I need to be healthy, I need to feel good about who I am. I am learning to like myself a little more each day, and it is not all about being thin. I will never be the model that stares out from the magazine stands, I will never be as thin as I would like. I am after all a woman in her fifties. I am starting to like the new reflection I see in the mirror, a little older, a little wiser and a little thinner. I do know one thing…I am ready to begin to live.

Teresa Gale

Weighty Issues

Weighty Issues

I am fat. There…I said it. Finally the secret I have long held inside is out. Whew!

It isn’t as if I didn’t say it out loud and in a public forum that it would make it real, I mean, anyone who looked at me twice, would be able to see I am fat. However, saying it out loud makes it “out there” now.

I can remember the very first time someone called me fat. I was all of about ten years old and the hurtful words were meant to wound me. It was my brother who had been upset over something I cannot remember. I can still feel the way I cringed over the word, a word spoken to hurt and hurt it did. I crept up the stairs to my mother’s room and stood in front of the full length mirror turning this way and that trying to see what fat looked like.

In the reflection was a girl who had a small rounded belly, long bird legs along with a flat chest and in that moment, the belly grew larger in my eyes. I was now fat, it had been confirmed and the struggles began. Forever after that moment I would wrestle not only with the word, but with my weight. I had been labeled and I felt as if my very fatness was growing by the moment.

From that moment on, my life revolved around my weight. As I look back at pictures of myself at that age, I am amazed at the pencil thin girl with long brown hair and cat-like eyes. My face was thin, legs long and slender and my belly, well, it is almost non-existent. My issue with my weight may have begun at age ten, but it wasn’t until much later that the actual real live, honest to God fat developed.

My teen years were fraught with trying to fit in and living a life at home that was anything but normal. An alcoholic mother who often was so insecure she would lash out at me to get me to cry, crying to her meant love. If I would cry she must have felt I loved her. Her sickness, my co-dependency was all instrumental in my weight issues. I wanted to fit in, fit in at home, at school and with all the pretty girls I came in contact with during those years. I wanted my mom to love me and the girls at school to accept me.

I learned early to carry myself tall and straight, sucking in my abdomen to make me appear thinner than I would ever feel. The looks I got as I walked down the hallway made me more self conscious. I felt that the eyes must be examining my fat. I felt so insecure I would hide myself within. I was considered stuck up by school mates, stiff and unapproachable. Little would the kids I went to school with know the home life I led and the reasons behind my shy, quiet nature nor little did I know that the boys liked what they saw and made the girls jealous.

So my journey began. I developed a chest that was quite large. I was a late bloomer in that department, or so I thought, but in fact developed womanly curves far beyond my age. The fact I was curvy and taller than most of the girls in my class, only made me stand out more.

Throughout the years, my weight has gone up and down, up and down, and not unlike a roller coaster and often making me so frustrated. When I read back at old journals or New Year’s resolutions, my weight issue has always been at the top of my entries.

So here I go again, only this time I am in my fifties and the metabolism is almost non-existent. For the next several months, I shall blog about this “Fat Girl” inside or outside of me. As I begin yet again another weight loss journey, I pray I can whittle away the “Fat Girl” and find inside the real me. Thin or fat, there is a self discovery in process. Anyone who has ever had a weight issue may well recognize themselves in my story.

Teresa Gale

Stuff

I have a lot of…stuff. My kids, my husband, my family and a few friends all make jokes about all my…stuff. I view my treasures very differently than they do, however, I am beginning to feel claustrophobic.

As I sit here in my downstairs family room situated in what I always have felt a quite cozy home, I survey the room. What happened? How did I get to this place?

A stack of “want to read” books surround me. I love books, I love the feel of pages, the scent of paper and the words filling the pages with stories that will take me to far off places. I adore books that touch the heartstrings, books that make me laugh, make me cry and leave me in suspense as I turn the pages. As a matter of fact, I will admit…I am a book addict. I cannot pass a book store without picking one up and adding it to my “want to read” stack.

However, my books are taking over. I have them stacked beside me, behind me, in a basket at my feet and on a small ledge by the window. I have bibles that I took to Israel three times, a bible I truly treasure filled with notes on thoughts and feelings. I have another bible that belonged to the kid’s great grandmother and one of the first few I read as a young Christian. I have journals and journals telling my story on shelves in my room. I have baby books revealing the start of little lives stored away for keeps.

I find it interesting the stuff we keep, the stuff we collect throughout the years. In my family room, on almost every table or stand, I could pick up something that “means” something special to me. There are several items the kids made me, bought me or gave to me. Some of the items the grandchildren gave to me that I treasure. When I look at the stuff, I can’t bear the thought of pitching it. My children, most of them are now grown, have no idea that some of these seemingly insignificant gifts mean something to me.

The family room has that “lived in look”. In other less kind words, it’s a mess. As I look straight ahead of me, my coffee table is loaded with stuff, my fireplace houses photo albums waiting to be transformed into scrapbooks and the television holds photos, candles and a clock. It’s a mess filled with my stuff. On the mantle over the fireplace I have a brick from the brick yard my Papaw Bill worked at and a rock from my dear Aunt Pauline’s yard. These small things tie me to my family. Strange, huh? I mean, they are only things right?

I have mementos from travels, distant places around the world. There are two pillows from Panama on a trip my brother, God bless his heart, took me on. I have rocks from the three trips to Israel he and I traveled to, a photo book from New York City where I traveled with my four girls one weekend, I have items from Belgium, Paris and many other travels surrounding my home. They all bring back a flood of memories when I see them.

Upstairs in my dining room, I have my Great-Grandmother Pitts dishes, antiques for sure. I love those dishes stored in a hutch the girls Great-Grandfather on their father’s side built with his own hands. The dishes were once promised to me by my dear Grandmother Goldie and before she passed, I carefully packed them up and took them home. I cried as I dropped two plates while I was washing them to put them away. They tie me to a past, a place where families had sit down dinners together, where loving hands made the meals and decorated their meager living spaces. I was a little girl when my grandmother served me a meal of fried chicken and mashed potatoes made with real butter on these very plates. I remember her loving look as she patted me on the head and told me the pretty plates, mix matched for sure, would one day be mine. After her death I brought them home and on our first Thanksgiving in our new home, I served my girls a big meal on them.

These very dishes served a family of five over 75 years before. Although they are not a whole set anymore, one plate I managed to glue back together, they belonged to my past, they link me to two very special ladies in my life and have now served five generations. I can almost picture my petite Great-grandmother setting the plate to her giant sized husband and three little girls. The dishes hold history for me, family and friends breaking bread and sharing lives over a meal.

How could I part with these treasures? Would they ever begin to mean the same things to my children, or my children’s children? The answer is probably not. I know one day I will pass away and the kids will do just as they have joked for years; they will take my stuff out to the backyard and while remembering me I hope fondly, have a huge bonfire. One person’s treasures will become another person’s stuff.

However, I hope, as they are cleaning out my stuff, as they dismantle my life they will pause and remember me. I pray as they hold an item in their hands, most likely shaking their heads, they will see that the tiny picture painted for me years ago by tiny hands was treasured. I keep these things as a silly gesture of those I love. I cannot take these things with me, nor will I need them where I am going. But while I am here, I will look at them fondly, I will remember those I treasured in my life gifting these silly items to me and how much I adored them.

Yes, I have a lot of stuff. I am beginning to part with a few items here and there, things that are not tied to precious memoires. I am downsizing just a little, but not as much as my family would like. I like to think by giving up my stuff now I would be stealing that pleasure of a bonfire filled with memories I smile at the thought of them all gathered together throwing away my stuff and laughing. I can see them now, hugging, maybe crying a bit and laughing together as a family. The bonfire will be bringing them all together thinking of me and the past. The joke is on them.

Teresa Gale

Rescued

Words seldom come to me lately.

Exhaustion has taken over,

Worry creases my brow.

God lights the way, yet

I have been so blind in my darkness.

I am so hurried in my life,

Filling every crack and crevice

That I seldom pause, seldom stop,

Hardly stand still long enough to see.

The fog lifts long enough to see the

Light peek through – yet I struggle

in the mugginess of the haze.

I resign myself.

Stand still, listening in the distance

for Him.

I yearn for rest and love.

My heart tugs – leaping forward in joy!

He reaches beyond the haze and envelopes

me in sunshine.

I bask in His light, in His love.

Dancing with joy I feel lighter.

I am rescued!

Teresa Gale

Sunbeams

Awake to the early dawn hours,
as the sun slips out from under
the blankets of a star filled night.

Rising, the sun chases away,
the ivory moon to bid goodnight.
Yawning, the moon waves
a sleepy farewell.

The golden orange glow,
bathes me in sunbeams,
that warms my soul when
it calls to wake to the
beautiful anchor of light.

A light breeze plays a
soft melody with the
rustling of leaves on trees.
Swish, swish, swish.
The morning's tone is set.

I view the horizon,
Joy jumps in my heart,
As the sun whisks me to
The here and now.

Teresa Gale